Tag: spirituality

The story’s all too common. The preacher walks slowly to the front and faces the church with his head bowed. His voice is quivering and his hands are shaking and his heart is racing as he tells the story that by now has already made the church-gossip rounds. He dodges the most scandalous words, but everybody knows what he’s saying. He made some mistakes. He let everyone down. He broke his vows. He begs for forgiveness.

He shuffles to the back of the church, the elders make a short statement, there’s a lot of hugging and crying, and then the talking really starts.

How could he? He was my preacher. He baptized my kids. I shared some of my struggles with him.

After people calm down and the shock wears off, they ask good questions. The most important, I think, are these: How? How did our preacher, a minister of the gospel, a man of God, a lover of Jesus, let this happen?

Those are questions that I’ve asked many times, especially after it happens to a friend, someone I ate lunch with, laughed with, prayed with, talked about ministry with.

But this devotional isn’t about preachers, really. It’s about all of us. It’s about the temptation we face to put more emphasis on the outer us than the inner us.

I’m more interested in how it happens to us, us Christians, us “normal,” just-trying-to-get-by Jesus-followers.

And by “it” I don’t mean an affair, but rather the duplicity, the two-facedness, the difference between the me who goes to church and the me who goes home, to school, and to work.

We all do it, don’t we? Is there anyone out there who hasn’t had a family fuss on the way to church and then greeted everyone in the building with the I-love-Jesus-so-much smile? Truth is, there’s a little hypocrite in all of us.

But the call to follow Jesus is a call to think a whole lot less about what people think of us and a whole lot more about what God’s doing in us, to us, and for us. Even when Jesus told us to let our lights shine and our saltiness taste, he wasn’t encouraging us to think mostly about creating good will in the people around us. He was reminding us that when we give him our hearts it’ll show through.

He was concerned more about the heart than he was the hands, because he knows if he gets the heart he’ll get the hands. Remember his scathing rebuke of the Pharisees?

You’re all spit, polish, and shine on the outside, but you’re filthy inside.

You’re like a marble tombstone whose beauty and elegance keep us from thinking about what’s in the ground below.

Those words ought to hit pretty close to home because it’s easy to think that the person everyone thinks we are is the person we really are . . . and that’s simply not true.

At some point the vow-breaking preacher forgot to protect his heart, and he did something he’d promised himself he’d never do. Somehow, once he started down that path, he was able to compartmentalize his life—preach the life-giving gospel on Sunday and deny its truth on Monday.

But as easy as it is to demonize him—and we shouldn’t excuse him—pointing out hypocrisy in others might be an easy way to avoid the tendencies in ourselves.

None of us—no matter who we are—can neglect our hearts without the inevitable consequences.

Like many of you I’ve been steeped in religion all my life. I was religious before I even knew what it was. I was half-grown before I realized there were actually real people who didn’t go to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and some of these people even lived in my neighborhood. Hard to believe there were non-church-goers on my own street.

I was the kid at school who taught people not to use euphemisms, and not even to use euphemisms of euphemisms. (And yes, I knew what a “euphemism” was before I knew how to read)

What I’m saying is that I was pretty good at religion, because it was something you could see, something you could measure or quantify. You either had it or you didn’t, you either were or you weren’t, and I knew how to measure it.

Church on Sundays and Wednesdays?

Leather-bound Bible with name etched on the front?

Ask the Lord to guide, guard, and direct us, give the preacher a ready recollection, and bring us back at the next appointed time?

Check, check, and check.

Religious through and through, born and bred.

So it ought to shock you to hear me say something bad about religion, because these are my people.

The issue is this: people can do religion without ever having a relationship with Jesus. They can follow the external rites but never know God.

In fact, religion can even get in the way of a relationship with Jesus.

It gets dangerous when it starts to make us feel better about ourselves without addressing the real problem. When we think that going to church, reading our Bibles, and avoiding euphemisms clears our path to heaven, we’re wrong.

We’ve missed Jesus.

We’ve lost sight of why he came, who he was, and what he did.

As I’ve reread the gospels over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that most of the people who couldn’t stand Jesus were religious. They hated him, attacked him, killed him.

And the irreligious couldn’t get enough of him.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? The more imbedded someone was in the religious traditions of his day, the greater the chances he wanted nothing to do with Jesus. On the other hand, the more someone lived life on the fringes of polite, respectable society, the more he wanted to be within hugging distance of the young Rabbi from some backwater village.

Think about it. Who tried every trick they had to get Jesus to fall into their trap?

Who struck the deal with Judas, giving him a bag of money for a discreet location to arrest God’s Son?

Who slapped him, spit on him, and made fun of him throughout that long Thursday night?

Who was at the front of the mob yelling “Crucify him! Crucify him!”?

Hint: it wasn’t the streetwalkers, vagabonds, and lowlifes who had seen compassion in the Lord’s eyes and felt welcomed by his touch.

No, it was the tie-wearing, Bible-toting, Scripture-quoting preachers whose faces were green with envy and whose hands were red with blood. They had to put down their Bibles so they could slap him. They had to stop quoting Scripture long enough to spit in his face.

Yes, the religious people hated him so much they couldn’t see straight, while the ones whose lives were crooked followed and worshiped him.

I think the key is in this pithy statement from Jesus: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

The reason the religious folks couldn’t stand Jesus is that they didn’t think they needed him. They had religion, and it gave them what they wanted. Who needs a doctor when you’re not sick?

The ne’er-do-wells, on the other hand, saw in Jesus the embodiment of forgiveness and acceptance, scarce commodities in the religious tradition of the day.

And so they loved him, followed him, worshiped him. And he forgave them.

Religion isn’t all bad, of course, and I’m thankful for a home environment that taught me that there was more to Jesus than keeping some rules and not breaking other ones.

But the question’s begging to be asked: in your life, do you have a relationship with Jesus that transcends the rites?